OpenVPN 2.5-rc2 released

[samuli]

The OpenVPN community project team is proud to release OpenVPN 2.5-rc2. Source code and Windows installers can be downloaded from our download page. Debian and Ubuntu packages are available in the official apt repositories. On Red Hat derivatives we recommend using the Fedora Copr repository.

This release includes a number of fixes to OpenVPN, most of which affect Windows only.

OpenVPN 2.5 is a new major release with many new features:

• Client-specific tls-crypt keys (--tls-crypt-v2)
• Added support for using the ChaCha20-Poly1305 cipher in the OpenVPN data channel
• Improved Data channel cipher negotiation
• Removal of BF-CBC support in default configuration
• Asynchronous (deferred) authentication support for auth-pam plugin
• Deferred client-connect
• Faster connection setup
• Netlink support
• Wintun support
• IPv6-only operation
• Improved Windows 10 detection
• Linux VRF support
• TLS 1.3 support
• Support setting DHCP search domain
• Handle setting of tun/tap interface MTU on Windows
• HMAC based auth-token support
• VLAN support
• Support building of .msi installers for Windows
• Allow unicode search string in --cryptoapicert option (Windows)
• Support IPv4 configs with /31 netmasks now
• New option --block-ipv6 to reject all IPv6 packets (ICMPv6)
• MSI installer support (Windows)
• The MSI installer now bundles EasyRSA 3, a modern take on OpenVPN CA management

More details on these new features as well as a list of deprecated features and user-visible changes are available in Changes.rst.

For generic help use these support channels:

• Official documentation
• Wiki
• Forums
• User mailing list
• User IRC channel: #openvpn at irc.freenode.net

Please report bugs and ask development questions here:

• Community bug tracker
• Developer mailing list
• Developer IRC channel: #openvpn-devel at irc.freenode.net (requires Freenode registration)

[Al@COPE]

Observations:
1: You must use the Customised install to get the OpenVPN Service installed.
2: Not sure if it's just me, but on Windows 10 (Pro), the service (although it is started, and set to start automatically) does *not* connect under 2.5-rc2 as it does under 2.4.9.
Manually starting the config file (either GUI or right-click on ovpn) works though.
I've had to uninstall and go back to 2.4.9 to retain use of the service that works (on system startup).

[TinCanTech]

2: Not sure if it's just me, but on Windows 10 (Pro), the service (although it is started, and set to start automatically) does *not* connect under 2.5-rc2 as it does under 2.4.9.
Manually starting the config file (either GUI or right-click on ovpn) works though.

There are three OpenVPN Windows Services .. but I know which one you mean.

The profiles which the service starts have to be in "C:\Program Files\Openvpn"

The OpenVPN community project team is proud to release OpenVPN 2.5-rc2"-I601-2-x86.msi"

Worked well for me.